With traditional revenue streams like Voice getting saturated in most markets around the world, M2M holds the promise of generating new avenues for revenue generation. The standardisation of IPv6 has created an opportunity for having billions of IP enabled devices which can be seamlessly addressable through mobile or wired broadband connections.
Vodafone and Telefonica are betting big on this opportunity and industry estimates from GSM associations project a figure of 50 billion connected devices by 2025. So while the M2M industry is ballistic about such figures and underlying opportunities, the success entirely lies on fast adoption of IPv6 by mobile operators and equipment manufacturers. There is always a drag of incumbent IPV4, which can potentially slow down the migration and thereby the M2M business as well.
In addition to this, the challenges surrounding technology standardisation, the successful or timeous deployment of 3G mobile infrastructure by Mobile Operators and third generation CDMA EV-DO , HSDPA network infrastructure are just some of the problems that need solving on a massive scale for the opportunities of this sector to be fully realised.